LA Diary Day 4 - CLOVERFIELD - cinema verite my ass

No LA Diary on Day 3 - the closest I got to the flicks was dinner in the excellent restau. Blue Velvet. But on Day 4 a somewhat ill-advised trip to Mann's Chinese Theater at Hollywood & Highlands. Ill-advised because we turned up half way through the Clinton-Obama debate live from the Kodak theater which is part of the same complex. The mall was filled with anti-war protestors, a dog on a skateboard, and a good handful of outside broadcast TV trucks. There were also a scary amount of tooled-up rozzers* as well as two bedraggled musicians vainly trying to whip up some attention atop a Rock the Vote van. Among this motley crew were a goodly number of ordinary shoppers and voters standing in front of the large outdoor screen watching the debate live and cheering every soundbite. They were cheering on the possibility of change. They were standing amid the dying embers of a failed administration, a disastrous war in Iraq, fear of foreclosure, unemployment and uninsured illness. The Fear and Loathing was upon us.

In such a sickly political environment, horror and disaster movies have historically thrived. They allow us humble movie-goers to face our fears, embodied in randomised acts of terror and impotent protection agencies. CLOVERFIELD is a perfect exemplar of this. A big beastie stomps through Manhattan, knocking the head off the Statue of Liberty, chewing up Brooklyn Bridge and generally indulging in Godzilla-like craziness. The film-makers don't attempt to explain how the beastie came into being - and they wisely choose to show it only fleetingly. They do, however, skirt very close to the line in echoing iconic and disturbing 9/11 imagery. In an early scene, New Yorkers are seen stumbling through wreckage, white with plaster dust, scraps of paper tossed by the wind. Later, a heroine will be trapped in twin towers. Note that as daring as the film-makers are in echoing 9/11, the beastie remains considerate enough of studio financing schedules to terrorise beautiful people. Despite this, you have to give credit to the film-makers for spending some time to let us get to know the protagonists and to believe that they care enough about each other to risk danger to come to each other's aid.

CLOVERFIELD works fine as a post 9/11 update of the Godzilla story. Producer JJ Abrams and director Matt Reeves create a real sense of menace and fear if not outright scares. But the movie has a flaw: it gave me motion sickness. Now I get that director Matt Reeves was going for a gonzo hand-held reportage look. It's a laudable aim. But all this crap about "authenticity" and "credibility" is under-cut by his America's Next Top Model casting decisions. So, dear film-makers, cut the pretentious filming style already. Make a great movie that feels authentic and credible by all means. Cast people who look real, use a grungy shooting style, but you don't actually need to make me ill.

CLOVERFIELD is on release in the US, Australia, Hong Kong, New Zealand, Russia, Singapore, Thailand, the Netherlands, Peru, Portugal, South Korea, Estonia, Iceland, Latvia, the Philippines, Germany, Israel and Canada. It opens in Bulgaria, Denmark, Italy, Mexico, Poland, Spain, the UK, Belgium, France, Argentina, Brazil, Norway, Sweden, Hungary and Finland in February. It opens in Turkey on March 21st and in Japan on April 5th.

*Giuseppe from EC2 asks, via e-mail, what "rozzers" are. They are policeman, but the implication is, corrupt policeman. Also known as The Fuzz, Pigs, The Filth and The Sweeney.

LA Diary Day 2 - RAMBO - a short film about mutilation

Back to the Arclight for the fourth movie in the iconic and wonderfully mindless RAMBO franchise. Actually, that's a little unfair. The first Rambo movie was a rather moving, if violent, drama. A Vietnam vet called John Rambo is haunted by memories of war and cannot adjust to civilian life. He's picked up as a drifter by hick police, tortured and then hunted to (apparent) death. Rambo may have been a ridiculously tooled-up McGuiver figure, but he was also a credibly angst-ridden war hero. There was real substance to the film. The second and third films in the franchise were very meagre affairs by comparison. The ridiculous body-count went up and the movies almost parodied themselves. I grew up watching Rambo as a cheap thrill - a B-movie classic, if you will.

This new installment follows the sad trajectory of the earlier two movies. The plot is practically non-existent, and the run-time is almost insultingly short. Rambo is a cynical snake-catcher and boatsman in Thailand (I kid you not!) He's hired by a bunch of American evangelists to take them into Burma. Rambo refuses at first, but changes his mind when an inadequately pretty woman flutters her eyelashes at him. As if by magic (or the power of the Holy Spirit, for all the movie tells us) Rambo becomes a caring sharing do-gooder. Unless you're a Burmese pirate, in which case he's going to strangle you with his bare hands until blood oozes between his fingers and the flesh is ripped from your throat.

Yes yes. There may be no actual plot, character, credibility, production quality but there is CRAZY violence. Not crazy as in Tarantino or Korean extreme, cartoon violence but crazy as in multiple realistic-ish shots of bullets tearing into flush and bombs ripping off limbs. It's relentless and filmed in a straightforward manner that it is rather disturbing. It's all the more disturbing because Stallone chooses to use real footage of Burmase attrocities to open the film.

So, RAMBO is not a great action film and it doesn't return to the quality of the first movie in the franchise. Perhaps the best thing I can say about it is that it skips along at a rapid pace so you're unlikely to be actively bored. In addition, Graham McTavish does a good impression of a moaning London taxi driver, which is quite diverting.

Fans of lurid violence will be pleased to see a whole bunch of people get mutilated, not least Sylevestor Stallone, whose old, pumped-up body, throbbing with rip-cord veins, looks like a grotesque act of self-mutilation.

RAMBO is already on release in the US, Oman, the Philippines, Croatia, Greece, Israel, Kuwait, Russia, Singapore, Indonesia and Norway. It opens in Estonia, Iceland, Spain, Belgium, France, Argentina, Germany, Australia, the Netherlands, the UK, New Zealand and Denmark in February. It opens in Poland and Sweden in March; in Venezuela in April and in Japan in May.

LA diary day 1 - THERE WILL BE BLOOD

Right now LA is sunny but cold and I'm in town for a few days on business. It's a perfect chance to check out some historic cinemas and some new releases that haven't made it to the UK yet. It's perfect testament to the almost visceral impact of THERE WILL BE BLOOD that I was transfixed by it, despite the fact that I'd just come off a 13 hour flight and was running on nearly 24 hours without sleep. (In fairness, the fact that the Arclight on Sunset Boulevard is super-plush, has killer hot dogs and great coffee also helped, and I was pleasantly surpised to see I was paying just $12 as opposed to $25 in London! Seriously, thanks to the dollar depreciation stuff in LA is basically free now.)

Paul Thomas Anderson's new film is, like 4 MONTHS, 3 WEEKS, 2 DAYS, a movie that leaves you breathless with its completeness of vision. Every single aspect of the movie has been carefully thought out and the complete work fills you with renewed excitement about the power of the medium. The cinematography, by long-term collaborator Robert Elswit, is great. Just look at the scene where Day-Lewis is silhouetted against burning oil wells at dusk. The production design places us authentically in the grit and grime of the California oil rush of the early 1900s. More than all of this, technically, the supreme achievement of this film is it's sound design. Jonny Greenwood of RADIOHEAD fame provides a score that feels like Ligetti or Bartok. It's insistent, dissonant and jarring, and almost replaces dialogue as the explanatory aural medium for the film.

Daniel Day-Lewis lives and breathes the enigmatic oil man Daniel Plainview. He advertises himself as a plain speaking family man bringing riches to the poor farmers. In reality he is a misanthrope and arch-manipulator. He speaks with an accent from a history book - some say modelled on John Huston. He is mesmerising. The first fifteen minutes of the film see Plainview find his first mineral mine, and then bringing his first wells on-line. There is little dialogue. Plainview seems to succeed by pure force of will, and brutally brushes of any accidental deaths inherent in the dangerous business of prospecting.

After this prologue we meet Plainview in 1911 as he charms his way into ownership of vast oil reserves. He meets his nemesis in a young kid with delusions of being a faith healer. Paul Dano plays Eli Sunday as an irritating over-confident nuisance. Some critics have complained that he doesn't provide a meaty enough foil for Plainview but I disagree. It's fascinating that Plainview is too mean to allow this small irritant to persist and thrive. His sense of reason bristles at the ludicrous church services. But more importantly, his ego cannot cope with another man absorbing the people's interest. The feebleness of Eli Sunday also makes the scene where Plainview beats the crap out of him even more powerful and pathetic.

As for Paul Dano, maybe he was thrust into the role of Eli Sunday with too little preparation time. Maybe his scenes preaching aren't quite convincing. Does he really have the charisma to make us believe that he would found a church? But for every weak scene there's a great scene. One of the best is when the bullied preacher turns on his own father and becomes a bully himself.

If Dano's casting is one problem, I can imagine the final episode of this film striking some as over-the-top and ridiculous. By that point, I was so suckered into this world that I bought every second of it. And I think that is Anderson's real achievement here. He has created a world that seems alien and brutal and that is filled with characters from the Inferno. And yet, it is depicted with such conviction you can't help but take it to heart.

THERE WILL BE BLOOD played Toronto 2007 and will play Berlin 2008. It opened in the US in 2007 and opens in February 2008 in Austrlia, Germany, Portugal, Austria, Brazil, Estonia, Italy, Norway, the UK, Belgium, Argentina, Greece, Portugal, Russia, Denmark, Finland, Iceland, France and the Netherlands.

Outstanding drama marred by mis-judged ending - No! Not NO COUNTRY but IN THE VALLEY OF ELAH!

IN THE VALLEY OF ELAH is an obscure title for a deeply impressive and relevant film. It is about the impact of the Iraqi war on the boys fighting there and the families they leave behind. To that end, it covers similar ground to Brian de Palma's brutal, gonzo movie REDACTED and James C Strouse's delicate, mournful GRACE IS GONE. I think it's interesting that all of these films try to diffuse accusations of liberal bias by featuring characters who would call themselves conservative and pro-war. They are all forced to re-assess their attitudes to the Iraqi war by being pushed up close to it.

In IN THE VALLEY OF ELAH, a retired military officer called Hank Deerfield investigates the disappearance and then death of his younger son near a military base. He guilt-trips a local police officer called Emily into helping him. The movie has the superficial appearance of a police procedural but writer-director Paul Haggis isn't particularly interested in crafting a thriller. The investigation is a means for Hank and Emily to see first-hand how young men are transformed by their participation in a war being fought with only the trappings of traditional rules of engagement. They return home brutalised, their moral boundaries blurred. Formerly clean-cut young men become drug users; women are commodities. Despite self-medication, violence is only ever just beneath the surface.

Haggis' script is patient, well-observed and discreet. He never over-plays the situation. Charlize Theron's police officer deals quietly with sexual discrimation. Susan Sarandon's grieving mother is angry but not hysterical. Tommy Lee Jones' grieving father starts to crack with infinitesimal movements. It's a devestating performance.

The only problem with the film - but a fatal one - is the final set-piece. Haggis can't resist forcing a simplistic message onto his audience. It's a message that throws the careful balance of the rest of the film off kilter. And it's a gesture that seems quite out of keeping with the buttoned-down character of Hank Deerfield, despite the journey he's been on.

IN THE VALLEY OF ELAH played Venice and Toronto 2007 and was released in the US, Greece, Taiwan, Israel, France, Turkey, Italy, Romania and Singapore in 2007. It is currently on release in Latvia, Estonia, Mexico, Lebanon, Fiji, Finland, Spain, Portugal and the UK. It opens next week in the Netherlands and Russia. It opens later in February in Belgium, Denmark and Norway and ppens in Argentina and Germany on March 6th. It opens in Japan on April 12th.

I just don't get why everyone's raving about THE SAVAGES

Wendy and John Savage are self-involved middle-aged siblings, estranged from their father. When he's diagnosed with dementia, they put him in a nursing home. Wendy suffers from guilt and sentimentalises everything. John is more rational, on the surface at least.

This film was sold to me as bleakly comic, bravely unsentimental, insightful....as a showcase for two outstanding performances from Laura Linney and Philip Seymour Hoffman. Well, I found the script superficial, irritatingly earnest, dismally slow-paced and basically boring. Writer-director Tamara Jenkins' treatment of the impact of mental illness on close family is a very poor relation to Sarah Polley's infinitely superior AWAY FROM HER. Comedy? What comedy? Philip Seymour Hoffman in a neck brace? Please. Which brings me to Laura Linney's apparently Oscar-worthy performance. All I can say is that there was nothing exciting here. Nothing that moved me. Nothing that will stay with me. Even Philip Seymour Hoffman, an actor to whom I ascribe generally god-like status, is lacklustre here. The production values are also terrible. Just look at the lighting and picture quality when they're filming scenes in ill-lit bedrooms or on motel balconies at dusk.

I just don't get what all the fuss is about.

THE SAVAGES played Sundance, Toronto and London 2007. It opened in the US in 2007 and is currently on release in Singapore and the UK. It opens in Sweden, Belgium, France and Spain in February. It opens in Norway in March and in Italy and Germany in April.

Overlooked DVD of the month - 1408

In age of tired torture porn and CGI ghouls it's nice to be able to kick it old school with this psychological horror from maestro Stephen King and director Mikael Hafstrom. John Cusack carries the movie as sceptical writer Mike Enslin. He checks into room 1408 at New York's fictional but suitably gothic Dolphin Hotel. Enslin hopes to experience the terror that has haunted the room since 1912. Hotel manager Samuel L Jackson tries to hold him back - and if SLJ is scared you know bad shit is just around the corner. Soon enough, King/Hafstrom start unleashing old fashioned hauntings, poltergeists and general spookiness. There are a couple of decent twists and some nice scope for the audience to interpret events as they wish. True, the movie could easily have been around 20 minutes shorter, but it was wonderful to see a horror film that had been designed with care and intelligence. The production design is exceptional - amazingly I never tired of the fact that all the action boiled down to one guy in a hotel room. I also loved Gabriel Yared's score.

1408 was released in summer 2007 and is available on DVD.